Thoughts

Andrew Miller

December 11, 2022

The Strength of the Premium Domain Market

There has been a lot of Tweeting this week involving speculation on who sold what domains & what sales are real, who is manipulating sales, and who isn’t. More on that below. From my perspective and that of a handful of my peers with integrity & impeccable reputations, I can factually attest that the premium exact match, category .com domain market is so strong; multiple 7-8 figure sales and acquisitions are recently under NDA, as all of the real deals usually are. The market is alive and well. Look for a few more before the end of the year.

Twitter and the Domain Name Community

This has been an eventful week in the small-world domain name community. There has been some not-so-healthy random nonsense, in the form of nasty Twitter posts. Twitter is the best place on the Internet to get immediate news and information. There are some spaces that Twitter is essential for, such as daily fantasy sports (DFS) and Web 3. The DFS community on Twitter is fabulous and also small. We share information & root for one another to succeed. You cannot successfully play high-stakes daily fantasy without Twitter.

I have said for years that Twitter followings are grossly misunderstood. They are all about flexing, ego, and little about results. The real conversion rate and math required to monetize followings is so daunting that a rare few actually succeed. In the domain name space, the winning math does not exist. Someone may dispute that when they read this, but behind the scenes, I challenge them to prove it to me. Yet, many do not seem to understand that. So then, when something like this week occurs where people are trading punches, a lot of emotions get stirred up over what, in essence, is seen by hundreds max. I completely refrain from getting involved. It’s only about egos and not about business.

The Importance of Domain Extensions

I have been outspoken for 20+ years that any non-.com TLD can’t be a building block for companies that want to be long-term market leaders. This has been proven over and over. It is also important to strategically understand when something new occurs that is game-changing and different. We at Hilco Digital Assets are beginning to educate our enterprise clients on the importance of ENS, .Eth, domains.

In the early 1990s, it became clear that IP addresses needed an easy-to-recall way to be accessed, and domain names were born. The same will hold true with Web 3 wallet addresses and ENS domains, which provide the same utility to them as .com did for IP addresses.

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